ATLANTA – The hackers were out in force and trying new tools at DefCon
12, the yearly underground hacking convention in Las Vegas last week,
AirDefense says.

The
Atlanta firm, which provides wireless network security and monitoring,
reports that “data injection” and network manipulation tools were in
use rather than “sniffing” at the event.

"The types of attacks
we are seeing are increasingly more sophisticated than those of years
past," says Richard Rushing, chief security officer of AirDefense, in a
statement. "Whereas last year we noted basic denial of service and MAC
spoofing attacks, this year hackers have moved on to what we refer to
as level three attacks, where hackers are actually injecting traffic
into the network and manipulating data."

The company says attendees surfing the web sometimes received images and data that they had not requested.

AirDefense
also notes another kind of attack – a “Developer's Kit Denial of
Service (DoS)” – which it says includes modifying network cards to
knock people off a network, prevent others from sending data, or take
control of a network. Data is sent from the PC without having to
receive a signal from a network access point, the company says.

AirDefense routinely monitors networks at conventions and other events then reports on trends in hacker attacks.